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music on the mountaintop

What’s the environmental footprint of the average music festival? Add up the following factors:

Transportation energy: all of those fans, bands and vendors have to get there.
On-site energy: from stage lights to refrigeration, many elements of a festival require electricity… sometimes a lot of it.
Trash: just feeding hundreds, or thousands, of people can send literally tons of waste to the landfill
Water: Lots of people generally means lots of toilets flushing… and hands being washed… and thirsts being quenched.

OK, we don’t have exact numbers, but you can see that 2-4 days of music and fun can create quite an impact. A number of festivals around the world have decided to address that impact; others have built their events around ecological awareness. In both cases, organizers are addressing resource use and efficiency, and trying lighten the load of these events on the planet.